This course explores changes in visual art that coincide and intersect with the history of new media — from photography to the Internet — addressing topics including mechanical reproduction, perception, gender, sexuality, identity, interactivity, cybernetics, and popular culture.

Arguably, over the course of the twentieth century, moving images arose as the dominant cultural form, affecting everything from painting to performance. As moving images morph once more on account of the nexus of the Internet, mobile technology, and big data, what will be the effect on visual art and vice versa?

AHS 182 examines visual art and theory since 1945, focusing on work made in the United States and Europe. This course surveys influential artists, movements, and thinkers, emphasizing the emergence of radical art practices in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and their effect on contemporary art. An attempt to rethink visual art including experimental film, video, and interdisciplinary practices, this Art History class will also be of interest to students in Studio Art, Media and Cultural Studies, and more. The course will include visits to the Sweeney Art Gallery and the California Museum of Photography in Riverside.

This course will introduce students to artistic achievement of the world’s cultures from European and non-European heritage within an historical, cultural and religious framework. Topics include the diversity of artistic expressions and their functions in society, the relationship between artists, patrons, and the public, the connections between “high art” and popular traditions, and the use of artworks as historical documents.

The format of the class will be slide lectures with discussion sections.

This land is not merely a testing ground, it is also a forcing ground, a place where ideas, practices and customs must prove their worth or be discarded. – Carey McWilliams

This course explores California visual expression from roughly 1900 to present, with critical attention to the development of a purportedly unique “California art.” But is there such a thing? If so, what does it look like and, equally important, why? In an effort to understand the role of art in shaping the image–and idea– of California, we will consider artists such as the California Impressionists, Stanton Macdonald Wright, David Siqueiros, Dorthea Lange, Ansel Adams, Wallace Berman, David Hockney, Judy Chicago, Noah Purifoy, Frank Romero and others, as well as contributions to a broader visual and material culture by figures including Greene and Greene, Simon Rodia, Walt Disney, Ray and Charles Eames and urban graffitists. Key themes for the course include: issues of mobility and nativity, tensions of class, gender, race and ethnicity, landscape and the built environment, intersections of art and technology, and the place of California in an increasingly globalized and multiplistic world.

Among the most fascinating and mysterious works of art of Western culture are those from the very beginnings of human civilization and the great cultures of ancient Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, and Rome. In a survey extending from the earliest painting, sculpture, and architecture of the prehistoric period to that of the final dissolution of Roman imperial power in the East in the fifteenth century (the Byzantine Empire), this class takes up the artistic, religious, social, and political factors that shaped the art of those great cultures.

This course is an introductory survey of the art, architecture, and visual culture of Latin America from the colonial to the contemporary period. We will begin by examining the introduction and adaptation of the European artistic models into the Americas as well as the transformation of the Pre-Columbian art as a result of contact between these cultures, analyzing a variety of materials and media including urban planning, religious and secular architecture, paintings, sculpture, manuscript drawings, and prints form the colonial period (1492- ca. 1820). The second half of the course will be dedicated to studying material from the nineteenth century to the present, examining the role of the arts in the building of independent nations, how Latin American artists and architects responded to international avant-gardes, and conclude by considering current trends in contemporary art from the region.

This course examines contemporary art from China, Japan, and Korea, focusing on the themes of national identity, cultural diversity, modernity, and the East/West dichotomy. During the last century, these three East Asian countries experienced unprecedented levels of political, cultural, economic, and social transformation that confined and defined the practice of art and the artists themselves. We will pay particular attention to the way the artists of these cultures looked at their reality for inspiration in structuring their various projects. This overlap between art and society in modern China, Japan, and Korea will introduce students of art and history to a range of thought-provoking issues: the artist’s confrontation with Western styles and techniques, the origins of modernism, political ideologies, government censorship, alienation from tradition, wars, popular culture, consumerism, and even twenty-first-century globalization. In the course of exploring these issues, we will pursue how the meanings and functions of “art” intersect with a range of factors embedded in or introduced into each society.

In this seminar we will not be seeking some essential artistic paradigm in each culture. Rather than making simplistic arguments such as “Chinese arts are like X!” or “Japanese artists are different from contemporary Western artists in term of Y,” students are expected to make sharp and critical analyses of how artistic trends and the tastes were formulated and instituted at given moments of these societies’ history. We will pay special attention to differentiating the artistic/cultural characteristics of each country instead of looking at them as mere parts of a greater Asia. Remember, as there is no universally agreed-upon or homogenous Western culture, so it is futile to seek one in Asia. This course will examine a variety of media including paintings, prints, sculpture, commercial advertisements, propaganda posters, performance, animation, comics, and films, while exploring methodological approaches ranging from formalism to social analysis, from cultural studies to post-colonialism. All are welcome! No prior experience with Asian art or history is required.

CRN#: 25122Meetings: Monday 2:10 – 5:00PMPlace: ARTS 335

AHS 192 - Junior/Senior Seminar in Art History

CRN#: 22987Meetings: Monday 2:10 – 5:00PM

AHS 156 - Memory of Empire

With the barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries, and the downfall of the Roman Empire in the fifth, Western culture entered into a period of destruction and chaos from which it took centuries to emerge. This course is the story of how the West, having just barely managed to pull itself back from the brink of total annihilation, consciously (and, sometimes, unconsciously) determined to rebuild high culture–not so much in imitation of the glorious past of the Roman Empire, but on the basis of the new reality of the hybrid cultures that Europe had become, a synthesis of the Roman and barbarian peoples.

In taking up the cultural, religious, liturgical, social, and political factors that determined medieval art, this course moves from the often astonishing metalworking tradition of the newly emergent barbarian peoples to the, at times, mystical manuscript illumination of Hiberno-Saxon culture; to the re-establishment of high culture of the Carolingian period, with its art dictated both from above and from below; and, finally, to the monumental architecture, painting, and sculpture of Ottonian Germany and Early Romanesque France, struggling to rise up from the ashes of yet a new wave of barbarian invasions, while tenuously holding on to the gains of the past.

This course takes up the ways in which “modern” architecture, canonized in the 16th century, found new expression in the 17th and 18th centuries as it responded to new demands. We will look at the ways in which the city itself became a field for meaning, and how architecture came to refer to much more than just individual buildings . At the same time, architecture became a profession itself, with its own rules and traditions and, increasingly, its own logic that became the basis for building in the 19th and 20th centuries as well.

Starting with the Feminist movement in the 1960s, and continuing chronically through the decades, this class will explore the diverse artistic contributions, interventions, and aesthetic experiments by women in Latin America. As we will see, Latina and Chicana art evolved through a conversation with women’s movements in the U.S. and abroad. Artists such as Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta, and Marta Minujín reinterpreted transnational trends and transformed them into their own unique artistic vocabularies. In this course, students will be introduced to debates about gender, nation, and artistic representation as situated in the history and politics of Latin America.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini dominated the artistic life of Rome from about 1620 until his death sixty years later, and his legacy is visible everywhere in the city . This seminar will focus on his work within the broader context of Rome, both as an Italian city and a European cultural capital. We will discuss different aspects of his life and work, from his astonishing career and continent-wide fame to the ways he organized his workshop and the consequences of this for how we think about and evaluate his legacy.

This class introduces students to the history and methodologies of art history. As such, it examines the historical foundations of the discipline through readings of its formative texts from Vasari to the present, covering models and approaches of different periods.